Monday, June 4th, 2012
The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition
At the recent 2012 G8 Food Security Summit in Washington, D.C., Abebe Gellaw, a young Washington-based Ethiopian
journalist, stood up in the gallery and thunderously proclaimed to
dictator Meles Zenawi, “… Food is nothing without freedom…” Is he
right?
When President Obama invited the leaders of Ghana,
Tanzania, Benin and Zenawi to the Summit on May 18, few expected any
meaningful outcomes. A White House statement on the Summit declared:
“The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition is a shared commitment
to achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50
million people out of poverty over the next 10 years by aligning the
commitments of Africa’s leadership to drive effective country plans and
policies for food security; the commitments of private sector partners
to increase investments where the conditions are right; and the
commitments of the G-8 to expand Africa’s potential for rapid and
sustainable agricultural growth.” To implement the “New Alliance” and
spark a Green Revolution in Africa, dozens of global food companies,
including multinational giants Cargill, Dupont, Monsanto, Kraft,
Unilever, Syngenta AG, have signed a “
Private Sector Declaration of Support for African Agricultural Development”.
The
vast majority of Ethiopians eke out a living as smallholder farmers.
According to a 2010 USAID report, eight of every ten Ethiopians live in
rural areas with average land holdings of 0.93 hectare.
A 2011 report by the Oakland Institute (OI)
stated that Zenawi’s regime has “transferred at least 3,619,509 ha of
land to investors, although the actual number may be higher.” These
“lease” transfers (for 99 years) are handed out to companies from India,
China, Saudi Arabia and 36 other countries for pennies per hectare. The
OI further reported that “displacement from farmland is widespread,
and the vast majority of locals receive no compensation.” The displaced
farmers who have lost their ancestral lands to “leases” are mostly
indigenous minority peoples.
In 2011, Africa imported $50 billion
worth of food from the U.S. and Europe. Food prices in Africa are
200-300 percent higher than global prices, which means higher profit
margins for multinationals that produce and distribute food. With a
steady growth in global population, the prospect of transforming Africa
into vast commercialized farms is mouthwatering for global
agribusinesses. The “New Alliance for Food Security” will accelerate at
warp speed the “transfer” of hundreds of millions of hectares of arable
African land to Cargill, Dupont, Monsanto, Kraft, Unilever, Syngenta AG
and the dozens of other signatory multinationals. Working jointly with
Africa’s corrupt dictators, these multinationals will “liberate” the
land from Africans just like the 19th Century scramble for Africa; but
will they liberate Africa from the scourge of hunger, famine, starvation
and poverty?
A Brief Lesson in African History
In
1894, fourteen European and other countries including the U.S. (the
“G-14” of the era) held a land grab conference in Berlin to “save” the
Dark Continent. The publicity cover for the conference was the
liberation of Africa from the slave trade and the need to undertake a
civilizing mission. To that end, the Berlin Conference passed hollow
resolutions. But the real agenda was to carve up Africa between the
European powers peacefully and without the need for internecine
imperialistic wars. The Scramble for Africa gave Britain a nice slice of
Africa stretching from Cape-to-Cairo. France gobbled up much of western
Africa. King Leopold II of Belgium took personal possession of the
Congo. Portugal grabbed Mozambique and Angola. Italy snagged Somalia and
laid claim to parts of Ethiopia.
Ironically, the G-8’s “New
Alliance” smacks of the old Scramble for Africa. The G-8 wants to
liberate Africa from hunger, famine and starvation by facilitating the
handover of millions of hectares of Africa’s best land to global
multinationals in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Mali,
Senegal, Tanzania, Sudan, Nigeria and Ghana, among others. Is history
repeating itself in Africa? Only the people of Madagascar have been able
to successfully fight back and rescue their country from the clutches
of the international land grabbers by dumping their president.
Ethiopian Hunger Games
When
it comes to famine and starvation in Ethiopia, the standard response by
the ruling regime and its international donors is to deny, evade and
sugarcoat the whole thing in clever euphemisms (calling it “severe
malnutrition, “food insecurity”, etc.; see my commentary,
African Hunger Games at Camp David
), blame droughts and natural forces and endlessly supply food
handouts. Bad governance, dictatorships and corruption are rarely
blamed for the predictable and recurrent famines and starvation in
Ethiopia.
Last week, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Ethiopia
announced that “3.2 million people are food insecure in Ethiopia” and
that it needs an additional US$183 million to provide emergency
assistance. At the same time, Mitiku Kassa, Zenawi’s official
responsible for agriculture, blamed the “food insecurity” on drought:
“Irregularity in rainfall seasons resulting in problems of such a kind
is not a new thing to us. We faced it last year and a year before that
and we are managing it so far… The country has enough resources and
mechanisms in place to deal with it this time, though.” The mechanism in place is beggary proficiently practiced as a high art form by Zenawi’s regime over the past two decades.
A little over a month ago, the U.S. pledged to provide nearly $200
million in additional humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and the Horn of
Africa. In 2011, the U.S. provided more than $1.1 billion in
humanitarian aid. Ethiopia received more than US$3 billion in 2008,
making that country the largest recipient of development aid in Africa.
To
say that Ethiopia will continue to face chronic “food insecurity” is
like predicting the sun will rise tomorrow. “Food insecurity” (a/k/a
famine) in Ethiopia is expected to reach biblical proportions by 2050.
In 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau made the catastrophic prediction that
Ethiopia’s population by 2050 will more than triple to 278 million. That
did not stop Zenawi from declaring a crushing victory on famine in
2011: “We have devised a plan which will enable us to produce surplus
and be able to feed ourselves by 2015 without the need for food aid.”
Zenawi’s plan to “produce surplus” is to stretch out cupped palms for
handouts of crumbs left over from exports by Karuturi Global, Saudi
Star, Cargill, Monsanto… and the rest.
It is manifest that with
the “New Alliance”, the U.S. and the other G8 countries have willfully
blinded themselves to the moral hazard of endlessly aiding famine
victims in Africa and unashamedly accepted the moral bankruptcy of
endlessly aiding African dictators. It is axiomatic for them that
providing endless handouts to impoverished and famished Africans is
their divinely ordained “burden”, to borrow a word from the poet Rudyard
Kipling who romanticized British colonialism. But they are now playing a
far more sophisticated and deadly “hunger game” in Africa. They want to
use multinational food conglomerates to “save” Africa from starvation
by 1) subsidizing these giant agribusinesses to dump their agricultural
surpluses in famine-stricken African countries, and 2) by greasing the
hands of Africa’s corrupt dictators so that these multinationals could
“lease” hundreds of millions of acres of Africa’s most arable land to
cultivate export crops that command high prices on the global
commodities markets, without contributing much to the domestic African
market to alleviate endemic hunger. The “New Alliance” is a brilliant
strategy that will sustain the decades long vicious cycle of dependence
and food aid addiction in Africa while displacing and severely
undercutting the productive capacity of the African smallholder farmers
to deal with famine on their own.
Keeping Them Honest!
It
is noteworthy that few in the mainstream U.S. or international media
paid any attention to the proceedings of the “New Alliance” food Summit.
Even the international humanitarian organizations thought it was a
publicity stunt. Oxfam was dismissive: “The New Alliance is neither new
nor a true alliance. The rhetoric invokes small-scale producers,
particularly women, but the plan must do more to bring them to the
table.” ActionAid was instructive: “While the New Alliance touts the
role of the private sector, as President Obama said, this must include
even the smallest African cooperatives. The real innovators in African
agriculture are women smallholder farmers. Any private sector
partnership to improve food security must place them and African civil
society at the center.”
What needs special attention is the basic
approach to “food security” that was discussed and not discussed at the
summit. Rajiv Khan, the USAID Administrator and moderator of the food
security Summit directing his remarks to Zenawi said:
Ultimately,
agricultural transformation in Africa is going to be a partnership
between the smallholder farmer and the private sector. But the most
important actor here is the smallholder farmer that 70 percent of [interruption by Abebe Gellaw calling Zenawi “a dictator…”
] 70 percent of the population in Africa is smallholder farmers, so
without transforming their livelihoods there is no future for
agriculture in Africa. So at this stage the role of the private sector
can only be to supplement the small scale farmer. There is the issue of
rural roads, water supply systems, irrigation infrastructure. All of
these require public investment; and yes, we need more of it. But we
also need public investment. We in Africa are doing all we can, as I
said, most of our countries are moving towards 10 percent of their
budgets invested in agriculture; but we need partnerships. This morning
the President [Obama] was talking about the L’Aquila Initiative with
$22 billion of money promised. We want the money promised delivered as
the President was saying. We need that for public investment in
infrastructure. We also need the developed countries to do something
about trade because when you subsidize your farmers, our farmers who
cannot be subsidized by our poor governments cannot compete. In the
European Union, for example, every cow earns about $2 per day. Now that
is more than the average African farmer gets and so if the subsidies
were to be dealt with, we could have a better way of trading out of
poverty.
Khan’s assertion that Zenawi by “maintaining
strong public investment in agriculture [was] able to protect millions
of Ethiopians during the recent drought from needing food aid and food
assistance” is simply a statement made in reckless disregard for the
truth, and arguably borders on a patent falsehood. The fact of the
matter is that USAID is
clueless about its agricultural programs in Ethiopia, according to the audit
report of the Office of the Inspector General of USAID (March 2010, at p. 1):
The
audit was unable to determine whether the results reported in
USAID/Ethiopia’s Performance Plan and Report were valid because
agricultural program staff could neither explain how the results were
derived nor provide support for those results. Indeed, when the audit
team attempted to validate the reported results by tracing from the
summary amounts to the supporting detail, it was unable to do so at
either the mission or its implementing partners… In the absence of a
complete and current performance management plan, USAID/Ethiopia is
lacking an important tool for monitoring and managing the implementation
of its agricultural program.
In cases where USAID has been
served with credible allegations of misuse of humanitarian and
development aid for political purposes, it has turned a blind eye, deaf
ears and muted lips. In 2009, the U.S. State Department, under which the
USAID operates as the agency primarily responsible for administering
civilian foreign aid, promised to investigate allegations that “$850
million in food and anti-poverty aid from the U.S. is being distributed
on the basis of political favoritism by the current prime minister’s
party.” No report has been issued.
Khan and Zenawi can talk about
“public investment” and the “smallholder farmer” until the cows come
home, but the fact of the matter is that neither Ethiopia nor the rest
of Africa can achieve food sufficiency by tethering predatory
multinational corporations with corrupt African dictators in a new
“alliance for food security” and and strapping them around the necks of
Africa’s smallholder farmers. A joint venture between jackals and
hyenas will never benefit the gazelles.
There are some simple
questions that need to be asked about Ethiopia’s hunger games: Could
Ethiopia reasonably expect to achieve food security when its citizens
are prohibited by law from owning agricultural (for that matter all)
land? Does it make sense to hand out the country’s most arable land to
“foreign investors” to produce food for export and ensure food security
in other countries when Ethiopians are dying from starvation? Could
Ethiopia reasonably expect to be saved from famine, starvation or
“chronic food insecurity” by Karuturi, Saudi Star, Cargill, Dupont and
the rest of the vampiric leeches? Does the smallholder Ethiopian farmer
scratching out a living on 0.93 hectare stand a snowball’s chance in
hell against Karuturi, Saudi Star, Cargill, Dupont…? Is the ultimate
destiny of the smallholder African farmer to be a consumer of food
produced by global agricultural multinationals instead of being a local
producer and harvester of his/her own food?
Zenawi has adamantly
opposed private ownership of land, which by all expert accounts is the
single most important factor in ensuring food security in any nation. In
2000, Zenawi said (and has repeatedly taken similar positions since):
I
have not heard of any truly convincing reason as to why we should
privatize land ownership at this stage. I have not heard of any economic
rationale for doing so. If there were to be an overwhelming economic
rationale to do it and ultimately that would be the best way of
securing the interests of our peasant farmer and therefore politically
that would be our agenda… But at the same time we do not have any
illusions as to what land ownership can do to the peasant farmer over
the long-term. We do not believe that the long-term future and destiny
of our peasant farmers is to be stuck in the mud, so to speak. We feel
that ultimately there has to be industrialization, ultimately these people have to find to get employment outside agriculture.”
In
2012, Zenawi pontificates about the need to “transform the livelihoods
Africa’s smallholder farmers” through “public investment” and predicts
“there is no future for agriculture in Africa.” He just does not get
it! There can be no smallholder farmer when there is no land to have
and to hold. The smallholder Ethiopian farmer that Zenawi talks about is
no better than the sharecropper or the tenant farmer. When the
smallholder farmer is arbitrarily evicted from his land because he
refuses to support Zenawi’s regime, denied fertilizer because he voted
for the opposition or is put on the blacklist and watched day and night
by hordes of informants because he wants to remain politically
independent, he is no longer a smallholder farmer. He becomes a
landless, hopeless, helpless, restless, hapless, rootless, voiceless and
powerless panhandler of international food aid. Without the small
holder farmer, not only is there not a future for agriculture in Africa,
there is no future for Africa itself!
USAID, Ethiopia’s largest
donor, in its 2010 report (perhaps unread by Khan), makes the simple
point that effective agricultural development and long-term food
security requires “100% ownership and buy-in by the Ethiopian people”.
But instead of a “buy in”, Zenawi has pursued a relentless and ruthless
policy of kick out, resulting in the displacement and confiscation of
ancestral lands from countless small holder farmers. Now, Zenawi rubs
his hands with glee to swipe his cut of the $22 billion promised in the
L’Aquila Initiative. That is all he cares about!
Food is Nothing Without Freedom!
Ethiopia’s
four-decade old dependence on humanitarian food aid will continue and
worsen. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on
the Rights of the Child provide that it is the natural right of all
people to have access to food. But under Zenawi, Ethiopians face a
double whammy: A insatiable hunger for food and an unquenchable thirst
for freedom, democracy and human rights. Ethiopians suffer from hunger
and thirst because they are victims of a ruthless dictatorship!
In
2007, speaking at the World Food Day, President Horst Köhler of Germany
made the following extraordinarily insightful statement:
Hunger
is not an inescapable destiny, but can be eliminated by wise policies.
This requires first and foremost that the governments of the developing
countries make food security for their populace a priority goal….
Democratic participation by the people is the best guarantee that
governments will genuinely understand people’s basic needs and will take
these into account. As the Indian Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has so
aptly said, in countries where there are no elections and there is no
opposition, governments do not need to worry about political fallout
from their failure to eradicate poverty…. Good governance and a functioning executive are absolutely crucial for an economic policy that is geared to the needs of the people and will help to eradicate poverty…
Who
can seriously expect a smallholder to invest his savings in his farm
and machinery if he fears he may be thrown off the land at any time?… Excessive long-term help from outside can stifle the recipients’ initiative and frequently even results in aid-dependency. … Hunger is above all the result of political mistakes -
in the developing countries as in the industrialized nations. To
conquer hunger in our globalized world we need an honest, reliable and
partnership-based development policy that spans the entire planet…
Perhaps
President Obama could begin a new alliance for food security based on
honesty and a genuine commitment to fundamental democratic principles
that could help alter permanently Africa’s destiny as the beggar
continent. The real solution to famine in Ethiopia lies in nourishing
the emaciated Ethiopian body politic with clean elections,
accountability, transparency, open political space and robust human
rights protections. In 2009, he lamented, “There is no reason why Africa
cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food. I have family members
who live in villages — they themselves are not going hungry — but live
in villages where hunger is real.” President Obama should remind Zenawi
and the rest of the African gang of dictators that though man does not
live by bread alone, a hungry man in the village is an angry man!
Amharic translations of recent commentaries by the author may be found at:
Previous commentaries by the author are available at:
